Plano going by plan – new Sunce legal success story

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The Administrative Court in Split accepted the lawsuit filed by the Sunce in January 2017, thus annulling the decision of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Energy on the environmental impact assessment of the project – exploitation of technical building stone in the exploitation field Kite Vučje Brdo Plano in Trogir, that is, the environmental impact assessment of the construction and operation of the quarry in Plano.

The process of assessing the impact of the project on the environment is important because it deals with the impact of construction and commissioning of individual projects on the environment, human health and quality of life in general. The basis for decision-making in each environmental impact assessment procedure is an environmental impact study, which is obliged to address possible adverse effects on the environmental components of the area of ​​the project in question. Croatian laws and EU regulations provide for the participation of the public and interested public in a procedure of a public hearing. Accordingly, Sunce exercised its right to participate by providing expert comments on the environmental impact study in the form of an opinion submitted to the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Energy. Since the comments of the public and the interested public were not taken into account and the decision of the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports determined the project to be environmentally friendly without addressing all significant environmental impacts, Sunce initiated a dispute before the Administrative Court in Split.

The recently received court decision recognized the importance of the expert comments made and, accordingly, it was decided to annul the decision of the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports that the project is environmentally friendly and return the case to the body – the Ministry for reconsideration.

Although this is also a great success, we will closely monitor the new procedure before the MEPP to ensure that the new environmental impact study will eliminate all shortcomings and supplement it with the necessary important elements…

We take this opportunity to remind you that such interventions are foreseen and planned in the spatial plans, and spatial plans are, according to the Law, an instrument of environmental protection. Having in mind the usefulness of timely environmental impact assessment of all interventions in an area, we emphasize that it is extremely important to conduct a strategic environmental impact assessment of spatial plans and their amendments (especially at the county level) in order to assess the cumulative impact of all future interventions in a certain area on the environment and how in the future we would avoid the possibility of the existence of more than 10 quarries in a smaller area with unregulated infrastructure!

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